Here is the second installment in my series on the metaphysical foundation for mystical experiences. In this series, I am investigating some of the inherent issues and biases in the current methods of the social scientific study of religion (i.e., the field of “religious studies”). Do you think that mystical experiences are rare aberrations which diverge from “normal” life? This investigation may surprise you…
Aristotle’s Rule(r)
One way or the other, our current metaphysical worldview rests on the bedrock of Aristotle (384-322 BCE). It wasn’t always this way. In fact, for millennia, all philosophical, theological, and academic thought used Plato and his more idealistic interpreters as a basis. Aristotle was not seriously reintroduced into the life of the mind in the West until the High Middle Ages (~1200 CE) through the rise of scholasticism (most famously by Thomas Aquinas). However, from that medieval beginning, we have shifted to base our thought on Aristotle. The High Middle Ages proceeded to the rediscovery of the worth of the human uncoupled from divine decree in the Renaissance, and the rise of modern science beginning in the Enlightenment rediscovered Aristotle’s full philosophy.
While Aristotle formulated a comprehensive philosophical structure, the metaphysical bases that are most pertinent to our discussion are first articulated in the Categories before being fleshed out fully in his Metaphysics. He defines ten categories of being: substance (ousia), quantity, quality, relation, position, place, possession, acting, being acted on, and time.[i] Substance is Aristotle’s ultimate category, but it is unobservable directly so the remaining nine categories are employed to work back to substance by examining matter, meaning the material world. These categories are the basis of science and the scientific method. We use what we can observe or measure to work back to the essence of something. Social science methods, including religious studies, principally follow this pattern. By observing behavior and examining personal accounts, we can work back to the “heart” of the matter. While the particulars of the process have changed drastically over the centuries, the basic categorical framework remains the same. Succinctly stated, Aristotle’s philosophy begins with observation and proceeds from those observations to theorizing (what we would today refer to as an inductive process).[ii] Aristotle does not entirely forsake a deductive process, for his initial observations do proceed from larger categories. He also does not move to a full materialist viewpoint, but he lays the groundwork for such future shifts with his thorough-going empiricism.[iii] Presently, we have arrived at the point that it seems ludicrous to suggest that any science, even social science, should have anything other than an empirical basis and, by extension, a materialistic basis.[iv] In this brief sketch, it is easy to see that a metaphysical shift has occurred to get us to scientific materialism, but what is the exact metaphysical basis of Aristotle that is problematic for the study of mystical experience?
It is tempting to translate empirical as materialistic, but Aristotle is not an absolute materialist, particularly in his metaphysics.[v] However, Aristotle sought to investigate the world through a methodology of categories, and he proposed a general framework of ten categories within which all empirical analysis might fit. In our scientific investigations, we are the inheritors of these categories. This is why we measure height, width, length, and volume. This is why we break down a chemical, or an argument, into its constituent parts and expect that this dissection will explain everything. Aristotle asserted that investigation of nine of the categories would lead to conclusions about the object of investigation in terms of the tenth and all-encompassing category: substance. Now, Aristotle did not depart fully from Plato here. Both of them are concerned with the issue of substance or essence, but Aristotle held an empirical focus for his thought, and he even flirted with the idea that the ultimate substance was material in nature.[vi] Here, matter is viewed neutrally or even positively as holding the potential for knowledge which may be gained from it. This shift allows for a later materialism to arise, and it represents a significant break from earlier philosophical, and theological, considerations of the role of matter in the universe. While Plato’s metaphysics rested on the basis of representation, as I will explain in the next installment, Aristotle believed that the empirical process of investigation would lend some form of tangible evidence that would answer the riddle of substance or essence for any object.
This metaphysical basis is by all accounts very effective in most situations and with most kinds of experience. The modern world is built upon it. It works. However, what if you are using Aristotle’s categories to study a type of experience that has next to no empirical evidence to yield up, like, for instance, mystical experience? To be sure, there is definitely something empirical happening in mystical experiences. We can measure brain waves, heart rates, and breaths per minute for mystics. Psychologically and sociologically speaking, we can note the sense of time loss, accompanying visual or auditory “hallucinations,” and the various indirect effects of the experiences on individuals and groups. Yet, it seems that these shreds of empirical evidence are approaching an important subject from the most glancing of sideways angles. Changes in brain waves or a sense of lost time do not explain the touching of another plane of existence or an encounter with the divine as reported by countless mystics. While the scientific materialism built on Aristotle’s metaphysics provides evidence to show us that something physical is happening in mystical experience, it is an ill-suited metaphysical basis for making meaning of that experience. So, a modified metaphysical foundation is in order. I propose just such a modification, and, to explain, I will turn next to a brief consideration of relevant aspects of Plato and Plotinus.
[i] Aristotle, Categories and De Interpretatione, tr. and ed. J.L. Ackrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), lines 1b25-2a11. See also Hippocrates G. Apostle, Aristotle’s Categories and Propositions (De Interpretatione) (Grinnell IA: The Peripatetic Press, 1980), 2-3.
[ii] Terence Irwin, Classical Thought, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 119-120.
[iii] Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), lines 1041b11-33.
[iv] Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Mysticism,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Robert A. Segal (Chichester UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 321-335, at 325. Kripal speaks of this basis in terms of “Kantian epistemological commitments,” but I assert that those “commitments” reach further back to the influence of Aristotle.
[v] Irwin, Classical Thought, 124, 130-131, 142.
[vi] Irwin, Classical Thought, 125-126.